Literature in Art Books

The XTreme Art series is awesome and this book is no exception. I like when good triumphs over evil but drawing villians is fun. Now I am excellent. Really.

This book will bring out the malicious side of your child in the most creative way. The tips and techniques complement the mean with in us, to create the imaginative villains which live in a child's mind. Various figures + many poses & expressions to imitate when creating these amazing creatures. Using the 4 easy steps to guide the young artist and making it easy to follow and simple to create.

My daughter who is 6 loves this book. She is able to draw horses better now. It was fun and easy to learn with this book. Great buy!

My daughter is in kindergarten, 6 years old. Her art teacher noticed her with this book during school, so her teacher recommended that I get it. She is only 6 and seems to trace the horses, but enjoys the pictures that she gets as an end result. I am borrowing it from the teacher now and just placing my order today for it.

This book has provided me with valuable information about the history of children's book illustration.

Mr. Young is a superlative scholar with a fascinating way of gathering material for the benefit of his readers; everyone should take a look at this book.

If you are in early education this book is great for children to see line and patterns. Paul Klee is know for his childlike artwork and it gives children ideas of what to look for in his paintings. The history of his life is also very interesting and that is on the last 2 pages.

This charming book is presented as a children's book, but is suitable for all ages. The large, beautiful illustrations and reproductions coupled with the whimsical text make this imaginative book a delight to look at and read. Small children will appreciate the bright colors of the artworks, and the parents will appreciate the inventive way the author introduces an artist to children - without pretension or difficulty. Any parent wishing to raise culturally educated children should buy this book today! (PS: I say this with experience, both my 3 year old and my 10 year old love this book, but for very different reasons -- and I even catch my husband flipping through it at times)

After meeting the author and illustrator, I bought all of the Dropping in on books for my classroom. The Dropping in on books and videos are delightful and informative. I will buy more to give as gifts.

Can't wait for the next set!!

Readers old and young will enjoy Pamela Geiger Stephen's humorous, lighthearted, but informative approach which combines Jim McNeill's deft illustrations with actual art images from the work of Pablo Picasso. As Picasso's masterworks are presented and explored, the characters in this lively picture book pose open-ended questions that will prompt the reader to make his or her own critical analyses and interpretations of these seminal works of art. Indeed, it's finding out that Picasso's artwork continues to pose answered questions is a major part of the attraction of this unique approach to art instruction for young (and not-so-young!) readers. Also very highly recommended is the Crystal Productions VHS video tape format of Dropping In On Picasso that has Puffer dropping in on Pablo Picasso in an animated approach that combines sequences with details and full-screen images of the artwork. This superbly produced video is accompanied by a guide with suggested activities, making it ideal as a supplement for school art history and art appreciation curriculums and classes.

Pamela Geiger Stephens' Dropping In On Rousseau is an enjoyable and rather elegant picture book that blends the famous Rousseau's classic artworks with simple and engaging color illustrations by Jim McNeill. A bumbling Puffer flies into early twentieth-century Paris to meet the self-trained artist Rousseau, in this cleverly written and presented book that introduces young readers to memorable artistic treasures. Also very highly recommended is the sixteen minute VHS video of Dropping In On Rousseau (CP-6185, $$).

Have you ever visited an art museum and wondered what people were thinking as they stood for extended periods of time in front of a masterwork? Have you ever wondered what it was that you were missing that everyone else saw? "Dropping in on Rousseau" might be just what you need to help you better understand how to describe, analyze, and interpret works of art.

While "Dropping in on Rousseau" is specific to the artwork of the self-trained French artist, Henri Rousseau, many of the descriptive, analytic, and interpretative skills that the book introduces can be applied when looking at other art objects. Although the book is categorized as a book for children, the skills that it introduces and fosters are skills that could help adults as well as children learn to understand art better.

This is a book that belongs in every well-read child's home collection. It is a book that should be in every school library. Beautifully illustrated and well written," Dropping in on Rousseau" will appeal to children and adults; it is a perfect companion to the animated video of the same title.

This is one of the best New Critical Idiom titles: well-organized, clearly written, balanced and thoughtful, both comprehensive and comprehensible. If you need an introduction to the field of ecocriticism, this is the best place to start.

Contrary to what the previous reviewer claims, the book has well-informed discussions of both Christianity (in a chapter on Apocalypse, where he contrasts millenialist visions of the end of the world with Augustine's "comic" (i.e. unpredictable) eschatology) and of various eco-feminist and deep-ecological ideas of the Great Mother. Garrard is a generous reader, but does not hesitate to point out excesses and contradictions. His distinction between "problems in ecology" (which call for scientific analysis) and "ecological problems" (requiring social and cultural understanding) is worth the price of the book.

I got this book not expecting much. As I've seen it the ecocriticism field is just as rotten through with poor thought as most fields of literary criticism. But the book turned out to puncture many ecopieties and call into question almost every preconception but two.

One is that Christianity is destructive of the earth. Yes, he left that unquestioned on the table. The earth is a gift from God so to not respect it or to trash it as this book implies is just purely wrong for Christians.

Second, that matriarchy is a good thing. The notion of a primitive matriarchy that preexisted patriarchy is shaky and based on wish-fulfillment. The very definition of matriarchy is hard to pin down, and doesn't turn out to mean anything. Feminist scholars have turned the idea upside down and inside out and find that it's largely a 70s feminist idea that is based purely on the essentialism of that era.

But those are small blemishes. The prose is sharp, and the ideas are otherwise fairly sound throughout the book. There is a great bibliography, and many new ideas. It is also fairly simple and easy to read. I only had to look up one word.

I recommend this book to anyone who would like an overview of ecocriticism. Not only does this book provide that, it provides a fairly sound drubbing to most of ecocriticism. At 20 dollars this book is a very sound investment. It's probably the best book of literary criticism I've read in a long time. I'm glad I have it. I'm going to read it two or three times. The mind here is playful and expansive and erudite. Couldn't ask for anything more.

"The Elsewhere Community" examines the role of "elsewhere" in learning. One learns by going (or being) elsewhere -- geographically, with other people, in another frame of mind, or with other types of literature. One learns by being around what one doesn't know -- something else.

And among other things, this is a fascinating account of Hugh Kenner's own voyage to elsewhere. In 1948, driving from Toronto to New Haven (via New York and Washington) with Marshall McLuhan, Kenner went to visit Ezra Pound, then incarcerated at St. Elizabeth's hospital for the mentally ill in Washington. That visit led to Kenner's subsequent career as one of the leading critics of our time. For fifty years, Kenner has explained Modernism and its leading writers (Pound, Joyce, Beckett, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, and others) to us with his comprehensive intelligence and wit. This book is perhaps the closest we will come to having Kenner's autobiography, and it's a treasure.

Early on in their friendship, Ezra Pound told Kenner that he had "an ob-li-ga-tion" to visit the great people of his time. And so began Kenner's trips to Europe to meet the writers he has explained so eloquently. The stories of his experiences with these people (with Beckett and Eliot, for example) are always revealing. Kenner has always amazed readers with his power to see and to hear things that the rest of us might miss. His eye misses nothing, and his ear is musical in its ability to catch just the right inflection and the meaning beneath it. Some of these stories have appeared in Kenner's earlier books, but here they are presented not to Explain Literature, but rather in the form of five radio scripts. They are warm, personal, fascinating, and charming.

Read this book, whether or not you know Modernism. If you don't know Pound, Eliot, and Beckett, you'll want to after you read this. And you'll want to read more Kenner. Above all, you'll want to discover and explore your own "elsewheres."

This book is a treasure.

I had never heard of Hugh Kenner until a local radio station replayed the Massey Lectures ( a radio lecture series on the Canandian Broadcasting Corporation) on which this book is based. They entranced me so much that I went out and bought this title.

Kenner expounds the merits of travelling and meeting people as a way of both learning and shaping your life and work. He starts by looking at the "Grand Tour", the visits to Europe by the English (and later North Americans, including Kenner's father) and links in Homer and "The Odyssey", Aristotle, Gibbon, Wordsworth, Milton and Dante before moving on to his own trips Elsewhere when he visited first Ezra Pound and then T.S. Eliot. These allow Kenner to tie in Yeats, James Joyce, Henry James and many others.

Kenner shows how all these writers were influenced and educated by their own voyages and exiles and how the movement of people shaped modern literature, among others.

The book is marvellously written and incredibly engaging. It sent me delving into my shelves and visiting libraries to find poems or prose by the authors he mentions. It once again focused my mind on my own desire to see England and Europe.

I heartily recommend this book to anyone who enjoys literature or wants a marvellous excuse to travel and find their own Elsewhere Community.

I would have to agree with the other reviewer: this book is a great introduction to English literature. It held my interest in high school, and I met many of my still favorite authors for the first time in this anthology. The only flaw is having to choose between a Hamlet and Macbeth edition... it would be well worth doing both in one book! I still give it 5 stars.

You could not ask for a more complete collection of works by England's greatest authors. From Shakespeare to Chaucer to Blake, this textbook has them all. There is a nice variety of genres as well, to include essays, poems, plays, and short works. Anyone who loved high school English class will love this book.

Anne Barton, an emerita Cambridge, England professor of literature and history, called this book 'scholarly, wide-ranging, lively and witty', and she doesn't give out praise lightly: she also described it as 'a fascinating cultural history of England itself in terms of its obsession with Anne Boleyn's resilient daughter.' This was in the London Review of Books, which rarely gets that sort of thing wrong, so I bought it. And she was dead right. This is a stunning book -- broadens your whole sense of history. And such a joy and a stimulant to read. I can't think how they'll ever follow it, but thank goodness they wrote it.

This is a dazzling piece of cultural history about all the things people have wanted to be true about Elizabeth I whether they are or not, with fantastic pictures drawn from the plays and novels and movies in which her endlessly glamorous afterlife has been lived. It's a great book about why this enigmatic, dangerous woman matters and has mattered: it's funny, it's heartfelt, and it's scholarly too. Perfect for the thinking Glenda Jackson/Bette Davis/Cate Blanchett fan in your life, and a penetrating, witty meditation on fame, womanhood, and history.